Topical Reading: Digital Humanities
Course: BA3 Korean Studies, Leiden University
Instructor: Dr. Steven Denney
Time & Place: Fridays, 11:15-13:00, Huizinga 0.09
Duration: 6 seminars (October 10 - November 21)
Course Overview
This is the DH strand of the BA3 course Contemporary Korea and Digital Humanities. This course introduces students to digital humanities (DH) methods, focusing on text-as-data approaches. Using Orange Data Mining and pre-prepared Korean corpora, students will learn how to clean, analyze, and interpret textual data.
The DH strand complements the topical reading seminars by equipping students with methodological skills that may support their undergraduate thesis research. There are no programming requirements in this course, although students will have the opportunity to explore ways to acquire such skills.
Before the first class, please complete the software installation steps in the Getting Started guide.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the DH module, students will be able to:
- Understand the role of Digital Humanities in Korean Studies
- Apply text preprocessing techniques to prepare data
- Conduct descriptive text analysis (frequency, keywords, word clouds)
- Use classification, clustering, and topic modeling for analysis
- Practice data management and transparency with GitHub
- Reflect on how computational methods may strengthen thesis projects
Weekly Schedule
| Week | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oct. 10 | Introduction to DH, GitHub & Data Management |
| 2 | Oct. 17 | Text Preprocessing |
| 3 | Oct. 24 | Descriptive Patterns |
| 4 | Nov. 7 | Classification & Prediction |
| 5 | Nov. 14 | Clustering & Similarity |
| 6 | Nov. 21 | Topic Modeling & Wrap-Up |
| Final | Dec. 05 | Text-as-Data Analysis Project |
See the Syllabus for detailed weekly content, readings, and assignments.
Resources
Tools & Platforms
- Orange Data Mining - Visual data analysis platform (main application)
- GitHub - Data management & transparency
- Swirl - Interactive R tutorials in RStudio (swirlstats.com)
- DataCamp - Online R courses (institutional access provided)
Course Materials
- Syllabus - Full course schedule and policies
- Assignments - Weekly deliverables
- Explainers - Guides and walkthroughs
- Presentations - Lecture slides
This course is part of the Korean Studies program in the Humanities Faculty at Leiden University.